Free Soul Blaze by Aprille Legacy Page B

students about it. But before we had time to recover and
maybe think about doing just that, they exiled Phoenix.”
Everyone in the room looked down. I licked my dry
lips.
“Why?” I asked. “Was it just because of us, or-”
“Yes,” Dena said, but Theresa cut in.
    “You have to tell her the whole story,” the red-headed
girl said, her yellow-green eyes hard. “Or there’s no point
in telling it.”
“What?” I demanded. “Dena, what’s going on?”
She sighed, tucking her hair behind her ear.
    “They exiled him because of you two, yes, but also for
another reason. You see, after you were gone, he lost the
plot a little.”
My heart twisted painfully.
“Eleanora tried to calm him down. She tried to be there
for him.”
Eleanora. The young woman who had tried to make my
life hell for the one year I attended the Academy.
“What happened?”
Dena closed her eyes and tried to form the words, but
failed.
“He took her magic,” Theresa said for her. “He stole
Eleanora’s magic.”
“ What ?” my mouth fell open. “He did what ?”
“She went back to her family in Thurin. She’s no longer
a mage.”
I was shaking violently. Ispin put his arm around me.
“How can he do that?” I asked. “Can anyone do that?”
    “No. Only him.” Theresa folded her arms. “They sent
him away because they couldn’t risk that happening to
anyone else.”
I found myself nodding, as though approving of his
exile. I stopped immediately.
    “And Eleanora?” I asked.
“No one has seen or heard from my soul mate in almost
a year,” Dustin said, his voice hard. He had his arm around
Raven. “I’ve been to Thurin several times, but each time
her family would not allow me to see her.”
    “Rumour has it they’re not treating her very well,”
Ispin said, uncharacteristically grave. “My family are close
to hers, but they haven’t been getting on lately. My
mother disagrees with what they’re doing.”
    Poetic justice, the colder side of me snarled. I recalled
the way Eleanora reacted to my claims of slavery amongst
the servants who were the lower members of society due
to their lack of magic.
    But the other side of me remembered the good parts of
her. She had fought for Phoenix, had risked her life to
keep him in the castle. And now he’d taken her magic
from her and lowered her to the status of the very people
she’d belittled.
    “Do you think they’d let me see her?” I asked, but
everyone ignored the question. I took that as a no. I
doubted that Eleanora would want to see me anyone,
would probably misinterpret why I wanted to see her. I
desperately hoped that she didn’t think that I’d gloat.
After all, I was as magic-less as her at the current moment.
That meant she would be going through the same
withdrawal symptoms as I was.
Except she’d been going through them for a year.
I shuddered at the thought. Luckily, Dena was
continuing her story and all eyes had turned to her.
    “After he was exiled and Eleanora had returned to her
home estate, Iain and Netalia tried to return the Academy
to how it had been before. They succeeded, in a way; I
think all of the students had been through so much that
they just wanted to try to regain some degree of normalcy
again.”
    “That’s not to say we didn’t fight,” Yasmin told me.
“We gave them as much trouble as we dared to. We still
learnt, but we refused to hand up assignments, we’d miss
classes as often as we could, we never returned library
books…”
“You rebels,” I said, grinning. “I’m sure the librarians
are ropeable.”
    “We didn’t want to risk getting banished ourselves,”
Theresa told me, and my grin faded. “I’m sure you
understand.”
We locked eyes for a second in a battle of wills. I broke
it as I nodded slowly.
“Of course I understand. I would never have wanted
you to risk banishment in honour of my memory.”
    “And so we entered our second year of education pretty
subdued. We’d